Monday, March 25, 2019
645- Helpful Spirit
Spirituality Column #645
March 26, 2019
Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary
Helpful Spirit
By Bob Walters
“… The world cannot
accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him.” – Jesus to the
disciples at the Last Supper, John 14:17
Quick … who
is “him” in this verse?
Jesus himself? No, “him” is a third-person pronoun. Jesus is talking about somebody else, a person
not there, and someone quite obviously – like Jesus – at odds with “the world.”
Who is this nefarious accomplice? This “other”? This fellow outsider “him” who Jesus invokes and is so obviously in league with a God who is love, a savior who is grace, and from the same kingdom of eternal glory that nobody at this early hearing yet understands?
Who is this nefarious accomplice? This “other”? This fellow outsider “him” who Jesus invokes and is so obviously in league with a God who is love, a savior who is grace, and from the same kingdom of eternal glory that nobody at this early hearing yet understands?
The answer opens
this verse – Jesus is talking about “the Spirit of Truth.”
That would
be the Holy Spirit – the third person of the Trinity, the Paraclete, the great comforter, companion, and divine intellectual
illuminator to all who believe in Jesus Christ.
This Spirit is the oft-cited but frequently lesser-appreciated colleague
of the original, uncreated, divine executive team of One called the Holy Trinity. God is true and Jesus is with us, Amen. But we know this only because of the Spirit
of Truth, who resides in this world not to bring glory to Himself but to shine
God’s bright light of truth on the glory of Jesus through whom all glory is
directed to God.
To a world with bad eyes and
inattentive ears, it doesn’t make much sense.
Individual sinners tend to resist accepting
a divine template of God’s truth. We instead
embrace an impossible and illogical man-made aggregation of self-affirming personal
opinions that we errantly and arrogantly ordain as “truth” that are still no
more than opinions. The track record of
this small kind of truth is poor – it creates temporal systems, slaves, and
fear rather than the Kingdom’s eternal love, freedom, and peace.
Culture nonetheless trumpets the
vacant, meretricious claim, “My own truth!”
This means both “Don’t judge” – non-believer shorthand for “shut up” –
and also that real, objective, divine, right-wrong, one-size-fits-all truth –
you know, Godly truth as it resides in Jesus Christ – is demoted to the
vagaries of random human brain waves.
Let me affirm; I think those brain
waves are important because I think they, like all creation – like each
individual person – were created for God’s glory. But our brains – my brain – are tainted with our sin, our fear of death, our pursuit
of appetites, and our need for social acceptance. Jesus showed us a true, better way: God’s way.
What truth should be – what I
believe it is – is sharing the burning desire of Jesus to glorify God. How? Through faith in Jesus (knowing He is
God’s Son with all authority in heaven and on earth), loving God (His creation
and plan), loving others (in peace and freedom), and obeying creation’s shared
purpose to participate in the eternal creativity, joy, and fellowship of God’s
own community, the Holy Trinity, if we can see and hear it.
That’s what the Spirit of Truth is
here to help us with.
Walters
(rlwcom@aol.com) believes the Holy Spirit talks Kingdom truth
to everyone, just as surely as Satan lies to us about the world. It is people
who win or lose.
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